A portfolio of my past writing, and new stories as I develop them. Almost always deliberately funny.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Death to selfies

If you look at my banner photo on my Facebook page (that is,
if you even go there anymore – isn’t FB for old and/or dead people?) you will
see that it looks like a selfie. There’s my big old face dead center, scenic
mountain backdrop, artful sunflare, and all.

Except I wasn’t trying to take my picture. I am technologically
inept and was trying to take a picture of what was in front of me, in the other
direction – a beautiful mountain panorama. Therefore, what you see is the most
unpremeditated view of my face you are likely to get in this life.

Taking photographs was painful in the flashbulb and film
days. We were always steered to “look into the light,” which resulted in many
pictures of me cringing and clutching my face, albeit in good, solid lighting.
I still have flash-flinch, and few photographers have captured me with my eyes
open.

Now I bob amid selfie takers. The medium is the message. Everyone’s
a star, and anything is permitted.

With the democratization of the media, everyone is now their
own broadcaster and network. The gatekeepers have fallen. News and information
can no longer be monetized, and in a capitalist society that means the communication
apparatus is now for rent, with no public responsibilities (not that this hasn’t
been always true to some extent). Initially liberating due to the ability of
alternate voices to make themselves heard for the first time, the dissolution
of the news industry means that there is no impetus to find out and tell the
truth, to the best of one’s ability. And if truth is gone, all that remains is
assertion.

Anti-intellectualism is on the rise. An overarching sense of
being on the same page as a nation, no matter how awkwardly produced, is gone. Ironically,
that consensual reality was a product of diversity. That mixture of opinion,
fact, advertisements, propangadna, and as many viewpoints as could be crammed
into a print publication at once forced the reader to be exposed to unfamiliar
ideas, to be aware of other people’s problems, of trouble on the horizon. We
self-select now. People do not want to know what’s going on (unless, seemingly,
it’s upbeat stories about contemporary living for a savvy readership). We have
ensiled ourselves.

We are almost post-literate. We quite literally express
oursevles in images and video clips. We pose, we identify where we are, we say
how we feel. We contextualize ourselves for our friends and followers, always
foregrounded against a referent. We expel concussions of self-regard. We like
things, we share things, we argue online, but it’s all little bush fires out on
the grand savannah. That atomization of the media has fragmented the popular
will, stunted its attention span. We are all chasing page views now, and
anything goes, and goes by quickly.

We are exchanging the lasting for the ephemeral. The advent
of “disposable” media services such as Snapchat means that the content vanishes
after a time. With that the idea of generating something permanent is lost, and
under that I find a fundamental, intolerable despair. It makes me fear that
there are more people who think that there’s no reason to aim for something
that lasts than there are otherwise. (Since I’ve taken it on myself to tell
stories for a living, it’s of course in my own interest that I promote this
concept. Have you Googled me lately? Online, in archives, my stuff’s still out
there, and that’s the point.).

Instead of broadcasting to an unrestricted audience, the
nature of social media is constricting us into a multitude of discrete sets of
relationships – as numerous as cells in a beehive, each with a restricted,
mediated point of view. With no new paradigm of consensual reality emerging, everyone
is more easily entranced by their own illusions. Instead of the digital
revolution pulling us all out together into the light, it has merely helped us
build better bunkers.

So what’s the answer? Take otheries, I think. The obvious
metaphor from my tale of my photograph, that I obtain the most accurate
self-portrait when I focus outside myself, is trite, obvious, and ridiculously
sentimental, even for me. But it is true.

When we turn the camera around, when we really look around
us and transmit that, we’re on the right track back being human. All the old
media can dry up and blow away, and the new ones can assume their rude shapes. The
value in telling stories persist. We still need them. And when we tell them, we
do wind up asserting ourselves in the most powerful fashion.

About Me

This award-winning independent writer and editor returned to the place where he grew up after years as a wandering comedian. It's beautiful here. He served in a variety of capacities for the Boulder International Film Festival from 2006 through 2014. His writing portfolio includes stories written on topics ranging from grand opera to midget wrestling, for a diverse array of magazines, newspapers and websites worldwide -- including Film International, Westword, Boulder Magazine, Power Pickin', Parterre, Understanding Our Gifted, Movie Habit, Backstage, Muso, 5280, EnCompass, Senses of Cinema, Boulder Jewish News and . . . Philly Sports Faithful, for some reason. Also poet, playwright, screenwriter, blah blah blah. Check out his work at brad-weismann.com, filmpatrol.com and obitpatrol.com.

PM Dawn; Of the Heart Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

Ramones, Ramonesmania

Richard and Linda Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver

Richard Pryor, Wanted

Richard Thompson, Henry the Human Fly

Robert Klein, New Teeth

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma/Carousel/The King and I

Roger Miller, The Return of Roger Miller

Rolling Stones, Some Girls

Shostakovich, Symphony #4 - Inbal, Wiener Symphoniker

Sibelius, Symphony 5 (final version) -- Vanska, Lahti Symphony

Sly and the Family Stone, Anthology

Steeley Dan, Pretzel Logic

Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life

Stravinsky, Les Noces -- Bernstein

Strength in Numbers, The Telluride Sessions

Talking Heads, Fear of Music

The Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio

The Kinks, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One

The Mothers, Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets

The Mothers, We're Only in It for the Money

The Velvet Underground & Niko

Tom Tom Club, Tom Tom Club

Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner

Uncle Earl, Waterloo Tennessee

Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision

Village Music of Bulgaria/Bulgarian Folk Music

Vivaldi, The Four Seasons -- Zuckerman

Was (Not Was), Born to Laugh at Tornadoes

Ween, Chocolate and Cheese

Willie Dixon, The Chess Box

Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie

XTC, English Settlement

" . . . you've got to stand up for the imaginative world, the imaginative element in the human personality, because I think that's constantly threatened . . . People do have imagination and sensibilities, and I think that does need constant exposition." -- John Read

"To disseminate my subjective thoughts and ideas, I stealthily hide them in a cloak of entertaining storytelling, since the depth of my thinking, shallow at best, might be challenged by erudite experts." -- Curt Siodmak